The bad news is that while there are three models in the US, priced at US$349, US$399 and US$449, only the top end model has seen the light of day here on the other side of the pond, priced at £299. The UK version is also only shipping with Windows XP, there isn't an option for an Ubuntu installation, as there is in the US...

However, taking the exchange rate into account, and the fact that the US prices aren't quoted with sales tax included, the UK price is actually (for once) fairly comparable with the US price for the same hardware. Well done Dell. But unfortunately there is more bad news...

There isn't any sign of the red version of the new notebook, either here or in the US. While in the US you can have the mini 9 in either white or black, shades of the Apple Macbook there? On the UK side of the pond you can have any colour you like, so long as it's black. Unfortunately for Dell, the red version was the reason I wanted one in the first place, it's certainly the reason my wife wants (wanted?) one.

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.